In his diary entry for Sunday December 18 1825, an adolescent William Gladstone recorded that he ‘Read a little of Father Clement’: not patristics, but the Presbyterian Grace Kennedy (1782-1825)’s anti-Catholic bestseller, Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Story (1823).Footnote 1 Kennedy, aptly described by Robert Lee Wolff as a 'staunch Presbyterian’, published all of her work (some posthumously) between 1821 and 1825.Footnote 2 Father Clement soon appeared in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and remained in print until 1911. By 1832, one writer mentioned Kennedy alongside the eighteenth-century moralist Hester Chapone; another elevated Father Clement to the status of such religious and moral classics as The Pilgrim’s Progress and Rasselas.Footnote 3 Serious Protestants, even ones who did not otherwise read religious fiction, consumed Kennedy’s novel alongside authors ranging from the evangelical Augustus Toplady to the ex-Catholic priest Joseph Blanco White.Footnote 4
Father Clement was not just a religious bestseller: it almost single-handedly reshaped the entire field of Protestant controversial fiction in the nineteenth century and, ironically, energized its then-struggling Catholic counterpart. Read by both Protestants and Catholics, it was praised, imitated, criticized, and parodied until the end of the nineteenth century, in book reviews, testimonials, allusions, missionary reports, fictional ripostes, and memoirs. Among Protestants its appeal was transdenominational, appearing in Baptist and Dutch Reformed Sunday School libraries and earning praise from Anglicans.Footnote 5 Yet its impact on nineteenth-century readers has long been forgotten; twentieth-century accounts of the novel, reading it in the light of what came after, variously describe it as ‘reasonable and persuasive rather than simply denunciatory’ or ‘low-keyed, belonging to the Sunday School rather than melodrama.’Footnote 6 Indeed, the Catholic novelists who followed Kennedy are normally dismissed themselves as full of ‘sentimentality,’ when not ‘feeble and unconvincing’ or just leaving ‘much to be desired.’Footnote 7 Yet Kennedy’s contemporaries immediately grasped controversial fiction’s simultaneous possibilities and perils. No matter how ‘light and trifling’ such fictions might seem, the Dublin Review warned in 1838, ‘they are of infinite importance, for here we have controversy in its most insinuating form.’Footnote 8 Reflecting on Father Clement’s success, the Catholic essayist Agnes Repplier looked back over several decades of its influence and concluded that ‘its progeny has infested the earth—a crooked progeny, like Peer Gynt’s, which can never be straightened into sincerity.’Footnote 9 For Repplier, the icy evangelical Hannah More and her contemporaries forever gave way, with Kennedy, to ‘the bitter ardour of the separatist.’Footnote 10
Repplier’s insistence that Father Clement was a ‘bitter’ book, in contrast to More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), opens up a path for us to reconstruct why and how earlier readers perceived the book as revolutionary.Footnote 11 Father Clement’s runaway success heralded shifting attitudes to early nineteenth-century norms of polite ‘spiritual conversation,’ on the one hand, and anti-Catholic apologetics, on the other. Specifically, Father Clement attacks polite religious sociability (associated with novels like Coelebs) by promoting instead the more agonistic mode of Biblical prooftexting. In so doing, the novel casts itself as a fictionalized guide to anti-Catholic controversy. As one of George Eliot’s stuffier evangelical characters put it, ‘Father Clement is a library in itself on the errors of Romanism.’Footnote 12 Father Clement and its later interpreters shaped evangelical representations of Biblical readership and interpretation, especially the beliefs that Catholics were not allowed to read and/or own Bibles and that the Bible alone, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, was sufficient to produce conversions to Protestantism.Footnote 13 Even though, as Seth Perry reminds us, ‘[t]he Protestant bible reader […] has always been a reader who must be taught, and not only by the Spirit,’ Father Clement imagined instead that any literate lay reader could master the Bible’s meaning, spontaneously and untaught - a fiction of Protestant conversion that Catholics would sharply challenge in their responses.Footnote 14
Both Father Clement and the struggles that ensued over it illuminate tensions in nineteenth-century thought about the practice of controversial debate and its relationship to Bible-reading, gender, and conversion. Father Clement consolidates prooftexting as the proper way of conducting religious conversation, while yoking polite gentility to Jesuitical manipulativeness. As its Protestant and Catholic reception histories suggest, though, the novel’s ambivalent treatment of its title character laid it open to Catholic appropriations that Kennedy could not have envisioned. Catholic novelists and autobiographers found in Father Clement a new model of controversial narrative, albeit one difficult to imitate because of its reliance on sola scriptura and lay, especially female lay, evangelism. They therefore reworked its narrative strategies to authorize conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism, defamiliarising Protestant claims about individual encounters with the Bible by developing alternative narratives of collaborative reading, worship, and obedience.
Mild and polished: Father Clement and the religious politics of politeness
Father Clement appeared as expensive multi-volume religious novels were ceding the market to cheaper single-volume novels intended for young readers, servants, and the poor.Footnote 15 Its affordability was key to its success: initially retailing for only 4s. 6d. and priced economically throughout the century, it was easily adapted for tract distribution and colportage.Footnote 16 But it was also published at a time when novelized religious polemics were experiencing new tensions. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, amidst the conservative reaction against radical politics at home and abroad, novelists developed plots that emphasized ‘rural paternalism, local communities, and close interchange between like-minded neighbours and friends.’Footnote 17 In their novels, religious debates usually occurred within domestic settings associated with polite sociability, which in turn was often yoked to membership in the Church of England. Anglican sociability, as formulated in the religious novel, took advantage of ‘the Church’s vague, contradictory teachings,’ which ‘derailed doctrinal controversies before they progressed into armed disagreements.’Footnote 18 For religious novelists, politeness prevented theological disputation from boiling over into threatening encounters, and located religious disagreements within a ‘complex network of directives governing conversational exchange’ that would remain unchallenged by questions of salvation and damnation.Footnote 19 But even Dissenters might couch their critiques of Anglican wishy-washiness in terms of politeness: in John Satchell’s Thornton Abbey: A Series of Letters on Religious Subjects (1806), for example, a spirited debate about the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England concludes not triumphantly, but with the letter-writer observing that ‘Tea was now brought in, which put an end to the controversy.’Footnote 20 In that sense, Satchel is little different from the Anglican Henry Kett. His Emily: A Moral Tale (1809), depicted a Catholic Baron, ‘candid and open to conviction as he was,’ who converts after pleasant chats with a Protestant clergyman.Footnote 21 In Satchel’s and Kett’s novels, conversion develops from an open-minded engagement between equals, but debates are constrained by etiquette and domestic rituals. Similarly, in Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife, the first religious novel to receive serious critical attention, an evangelical doctor tells the good-natured Mr. Flam that he wants to avoid embarrassing him in public. Only when Flam assures him that ‘[y]ou are too well-bred to offend, and, I hope, I am too well-natured to be easily offended’, does the doctor warn Flam about the state of his soul. More may have moved towards a ‘more active and less self-consciously polite Christian practice’ at this phase of her career, but still, even after his reproof the doctor hastens to soften it: ‘Think me not severe, Mr. Flam. To be personal is always extremely painful to me.’Footnote 22 The doctor’s spiritual medicine must be sweetened by a return to mutual harmony, even when salvation is at issue.
These early novels do not take Biblical quotations in religious conversation for granted. Rather than ‘sacraliz[ing] novel reading,’ extensive prooftexting might taint the Bible itself by profane association; authors like More reserved it for texts addressed to children and/or the poor, who might need more guidance.Footnote 23 Novelists frequently distinguished between disputational prooftexting and quoting the Bible as part of a conversion narrative or a call to spiritual reform, in an attempt to associate Biblical quotation with affirmative community-building. Thus, the evangelical novel Procrastination (1824), about the dangers of delaying conversion, weaves Biblical quotation into the narrator’s voice as well as that of the characters, but does not invoke the Bible to address denominationally-specific questions. Instead, Procrastination warns against the spiritual dangers of reading too many polemical texts.Footnote 24 Similarly, The Vicar of Iver (1821) uses Biblical quotations to conclude controversy and affirm community: thus, the Vicar and a friend reconcile after their debate on the British and Foreign Bible Society by quoting John 1:46 at each other, confirming their relationship on the grounds of shared Biblical knowledge.Footnote 25
Explicitly doctrinal prooftexting was associated early on with agonistic encounters intended solely to differentiate communities of belief. Satchel’s Thornton Abbey, which prooftexted to critique Anglican doctrines, was considered excessively partisan by the Eclectic Review, which felt that the novel exhibited a ‘spirit of positivity and infallibility,’ directed against the Established Church, likely to have a ‘fatal effect’ on those already inclined to doubt.Footnote 26 If Anglicanism was coded as non-confrontational, then doctrinal prooftexting threatened to exacerbate mutual antagonism. Significantly, an unauthorized sequel to Coelebs, Coelebs Married (1814) felt the need to include anti-Catholic prooftexts, an approach More had avoided in her novel, although not in her Cheap Repository Tracts.Footnote 27 The same anonymous author also adopted this strategy in The Irish Girl: A Religious Tale (1814), whose Protestant protagonists use prooftexts to critique their Irish servant’s belief in practices such as withholding wine from the laity during the Eucharist. Harriet Corp’s own unauthorized, satirical sequel to Coelebs, Coelebs Deceived (1817), warns against prooftexting, which the narrator denounces as a practice of ‘viewing every doctrine of Scripture detached from each other, and unconnected with the general sense of the Sacred Volume: thus it ceased to be a harmonious whole to my view, and my Bible was more the supporter of my arguments, than their foundation.’Footnote 28 For Corp, prooftexting threatened to turn religious speech into a dangerous ‘performance of piety,’ in which verbal one-upmanship becomes a form of violence directed against both the Bible and other readers.Footnote 29
These conflicts between controversial prooftexting and more sociable forms of religious discussion animate Father Clement’s plot. Tellingly, it is set around the time of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, connecting the Catholic Church to political disloyalty. This setting was all the more relevant, accidentally but fortuitously so, when the novel was first published in 1823. The most recent Catholic Emancipation bill had failed in 1821. In response, Daniel O’Connell and Richard Lalor Sheil founded the Catholic Association in Ireland, which made its public debut in 1823; an English equivalent followed in the same year.Footnote 30 Both organizations took a more openly aggressive activist line than their predecessors, and Protestants represented the Irish Association in particular as a subversive force engaging in ‘unremitting provocatives to prejudice and resentment’.Footnote 31 Father Clement’s insistence that the Catholic hierarchy was invested in undermining a Protestant government, then, intersected neatly with Protestant interpretations of contemporary Catholic politics, which would only become more heated as the decade progressed. By contrast, Kennedy’s interest in the Jesuits was more deliberately pointed, given that Pius VII’s decision to reverse the order’s suspension in 1814 almost immediately produced a ‘veritable explosion’ of antagonistic responses, fictional and otherwise.Footnote 32 At the same time, the novel’s apparent sympathies with eighteenth-century Catholics, who ‘barely enjoyed what could be called toleration’ and were still subjected to ‘many severe laws’ that ‘placed them on an entirely different footing, in almost every respect, from their fellow subjects,’ actually casts 1820s Britain as a haven of ‘toleration.’Footnote 33 Kennedy’s position reflects the repeal of the Penal Laws, along with the last remnants of what could be called the philo-Catholic tradition in eighteenth century literature, which praised ‘silent and unobtrusive’ Catholics while otherwise insisting that they were ‘foreigners and guests in their own homeland.’Footnote 34 Instead, in the novel the real depredations come from the Catholic Church itself, which exploits the ‘ebbing fortunes of the half-ruined house of Clarenham’ for its own interests.Footnote 35 Michael Tomko has argued that for William Wordsworth, Emancipation would reintegrate not just ‘disenfranchised Catholics but also their narrative of history’; Kennedy’s narrative attempts to cut Catholics off at a similar pass by insisting that Catholic history in Britain consists of a long process of self-devouring and, implicitly, eventual self-erasure.Footnote 36
Within this setting, two estranged but related families square off: the Presbyterian Montagues and the recusant Catholic Clarenhams. Father Clement, also known as Mr. Dormer, is from a family that supported James II, and like the novel’s other Catholics is ‘associated with treasonable movements.’Footnote 37 He tries to ensure that the Catholic Church retains control of heiress Maria Clarenham’s finances by making her obey the requirements of her uncle’s will that she remain Catholic and marry in the faith. Meanwhile, his superior Warrenne, one of the pro-Stuart plotters in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, ensnares the Clarenhams’ almost-Protestant son, who is eventually imprisoned by the Inquisition for heresy. By the novel’s end, Father Clement dies as probably a Protestant; Maria becomes a Protestant but marries her Catholic betrothed, Carysford; and her sister Catherine inherits the fortune, establishes a convent, and remains under Warrenne’s thumb. In abandoning her fortune to her sister, Maria apparently gives the Catholic Church what it wants. But her sister’s literal and figurative sterility turns out to be a historical dead end, while Maria, a new, Protestantized Mary, births the son who helps reunite the Montague and Clarenham lines under the Protestant banner.
Unlike the more familiar stereotype of conniving Jesuits, Father Clement is a ‘polished’ gentleman, always speaking with ‘mild politeness.’Footnote 38 He is a paragon of moderation who is ‘never excitable in debate, and always reasonable.’Footnote 39 Throughout the narrative, Father Clement’s persistent gentleness emulates the debates of evangelical fiction’s polite tradition, in which theology must be counterpointed by mutual reconciliation. By the 1820s, Barton Swaim has argued, Scottish expectations for polite conversation had shifted from ‘deference and a desire to improve’ to ‘competition and self-display,’ which downplayed mutual reconciliation as a necessary moral goal.Footnote 40 But Scottish evangelicals had long counterpointed their own bluntness on Scriptural truths to the Moderate wing of the Church of Scotland’s emphasis on polite language.Footnote 41 In Father Clement, politeness constructs a ‘false’ community by enabling Catholics to insinuate themselves into Protestant homes through shared gentility. Thus, the problem is not just that Father Clement is a Jesuit, but that he also elevates a façade of polite sociability over the quest for Biblical truth. In that sense, the novel unmasks the evangelical (and Moderate) ‘polite’ tradition by re-embodying it in the form of the subversive Jesuit, who undermines Protestantism by turning biblical language into something literally unspeakable.
In Father Clement, prooftexting explicitly threatens genteel sociability. This is exemplified in two key encounters that go awry for the Protestants: Ernest Montague’s first extended dialogue with Father Clement about Mary Mediatrix, and Maria Clarenham’s later contest with him over confession. In Ernest’s encounter, Father Clement’s conversational skills short-circuit the discussion. Ernest cites 1 Timothy 2:5, but Father Clement disputes the sense of ‘mediator’ in the passage.Footnote 42 Pushing the distinction between Scripture and Catholic tradition, Ernest loses when the priest instead praises Ernest’s ‘zeal for what he considers truth.’Footnote 43 This leaves Ernest hanging awkwardly: the ‘modesty of [Ernest’s] nature, and the kindness of his heart’ incline him toward the priest, but ‘such direct praise of himself, mingled with a defence so weak, of what appeared to Ernest gross superstition in his church, checked his kinder feelings, and reminded him that his companion was a Romish priest and a Jesuit.’Footnote 44 Ernest’s own polite impulses undo his religious mission, for he recognizes that debating threatens Father Clement’s genteel conversational strategy and, as a gentleman himself, Ernest halts.
This balked exchange is all the more distressing for Ernest when, at Father Clement’s invitation, he attends service at the Clarenhams’ chapel. Ernest experiences the service as a strange mix of sincerity and theatricality, focused, he believes idolatrously, on a painting of the Crucifixion. The group is fixated ‘with apparently intense devotion’ on the image and the family’s older priest, Elliston, is also ‘apparently adoring the representation.’Footnote 45 Kennedy diverts the reader from the service’s liturgical elements and instead directs us to the spectacle of an extreme religious passion that cannot be fully penetrated or judged beyond the level of the visual.Footnote 46 From Ernest’s point of view, nothing is present here except the spectacle of Catholic emotion. To make matters worse, Elliston then delivers a passionate sermon that reduces both him and most of the auditors to ‘audible sobs,’ which, pointedly, both Father Clement and Maria resist.Footnote 47 Such tears, far from signifying authentic identification with Christ’s suffering, are instead reduced in the narrative to a combination of bad devotional taste and dangerous self-immolation: the worshippers are too willing to abandon themselves to Elliston’s rhetorical flourishes. The emotional excess is all the more ‘oppressively painful’ to Ernest because he cannot believe that Father Clement takes seriously this ‘worship so little spiritual.’Footnote 48 Father Clement’s simultaneous resistance to and participation in this performance, endorsing what Ernest perceives as idolatry yet eschewing the theatre of devotional sentiment, is part of what makes him so unreadable to his Protestant interlocutors. At the same time, the near-total absence of content from the service strongly implies that there is also nothing in Catholic liturgy to read.
The Protestant controversialist, then, must learn to reorient conversation so that it always returns to the Biblical text as ultimate arbiter of truth, at the risk of impoliteness. To dramatize how politeness might be challenged, Kennedy uses Maria Clarenham’s loss of Catholic faith to trigger a key device in Protestant controversial fiction: Bible renunciation. In the Bible renunciation motif, an authority discovers one of their charges reading a Bible, and demands that the Bible must be relinquished and/or destroyed. Because this authority may have never read the Bible and certainly believes that the Bible should not be read, they confuse owning the Bible with appropriating its message. Catholicism is ‘idolatrous’ and ‘visual’ not just in its purported rejection of Bible-reading, as the chapel service suggests, but in its inability to distinguish between the Bible-as-object and the Word it materializes.Footnote 49 In Father Clement, female readers understand the Bible better than any Catholic priest. Demonstrating sola scriptura in action, Maria arrives at Christian truths unassisted—as she tells her friend Adeline later, ‘I have found that the Bible explains itself.’Footnote 50 Only when the history of Protestantism comes into question does she decide to ask an authority.Footnote 51
Maria’s disputation with Father Clement establishes the impossibility of resisting Biblical truth even when, as Father Clement admits, one reads according to the Catholic Church’s guidance. Like Ernest, Maria finds that her challenge to the priest on confession is met ‘with extreme gentleness.’Footnote 52 Notably, when Father Clement uses John 20:23 to support his position on church authority, Maria becomes ‘cold all over, and her limbs tremble,’ in contrast to her resistance to Elliston’s sermon.Footnote 53 However, when he shifts to icons and confession, she responds with ‘an expression of restored calmness and elevation.’Footnote 54 Unlike Ernest, Maria is impressed only by Biblical prooftexts, and rejects all other traditional authorities. Significantly, her declaration of faith, in which she asserts the power of ‘the words of the Bible’ over any Catholic traditional authority, is also a ‘confession’; the narrator strips the word of invasive authority and instead affirms confession as a triumphant act of Protestant witnessing.Footnote 55
Father Clement’s exchange with Maria dramatizes the argument that the Bible is fully accessible to even uninstructed readers, but also suggests its potential weak spot. Maria’s resort to sola scriptura collapses when Father Clement invokes the ‘where was your church before Luther?’ line of argument.Footnote 56 Her challenge implodes when she, like Ernest, falls prey to Father Clement’s ‘mild, earnest, sincere, and authoritative manner’ and concedes that she has failed to ‘humbly […] receive those instructions from Scripture which the Catholic Church thinks fit to impart to the young and weak in faith.’Footnote 57 Although Maria initially excels over Ernest at sparring with the priest, she eventually falls back to the position that the Church has already mapped out all correct interpretations of the text. As Father Clement admits, priests do not read the Bible until ‘they have sworn their belief respecting the proper interpretation of them [Biblical texts]’: in other words, the priests reject reading the text through any mediation other than the one the Church supplies, even before they encounter the Bible on their own.Footnote 58 What is at stake here is a war over the right way of prooftexting: one in which the prooftexts are drawn from a Bible available to all, and one in which the pre-approved, pre-digested prooftexts become the only Biblical texts available to the audience.
In this struggle over interpretation, Kennedy associates Protestant Bible reading with the Reformation and post-Reformation literalist school, in which ‘the Bible was easy, down to earth, and required no interpretive effort, since it did all the work.’Footnote 59 She represents Protestant reading as liberated from cultural or historical context and supposedly unmediated by concordances and commentaries, unlike Catholic reading, which is predetermined by ecclesiastical forces outside the reader’s control. Even Father Clement admits that he finds himself dissenting from the Catholic Church’s interpretation ‘[b]ut too frequently’, thus aligning Protestant reading with the ‘obvious’ interpretation.Footnote 60 Significantly, Father Clement’s decision to take Maria’s New Testament confuses the book’s materiality with its spiritual significance, as does Maria’s initial despair.Footnote 61 Once she remembers memorized verses and proceeds to transcribe them, however, her faith is reinforced.Footnote 62 By creating her own Biblical commonplace book, Maria replaces the Catholic Church’s already-edited and pre-digested Bible with a personalized text that testifies to her one-on-one encounter with the original. In David Allan’s terms, her act of Biblical commonplacing ‘open[s] up welcome new opportunities for clarifying, declaring, and underlining the reader’s own sincerity and steadfastness.’Footnote 63 This is the climax of the Bible renunciation motif: having unconsciously memorized the Bible, Maria separates the Biblical message from its physical embodiment. Her material Bible, that is, becomes merely the vehicle for the Logos.
The battle between faiths ends ambivalently with Father Clement’s death scene, in which Ernest and Father Clement both believe in each other’s ‘dangerous error’ and ‘perfect sincerity’ simultaneously.Footnote 64 Father Clement confesses that he doubts his salvation, but still hopes in the saving ‘death of the Son of God’; an elated Ernest declares that he is a ‘Calvinist, a Bible Christian,’ only for the priest to retort that Ernest is ‘a Catholic.’Footnote 65 Unusually, Father Clement’s death fails to conform to the tropes of the evangelical ‘good’ death, in which the dying character ‘placed his or her hope in Jesus for salvation from sin and thus was properly prepared for the passage from the earthly realm to heaven,’ commonly accompanied by words of wisdom to the deathbed visitors and a peaceful passing.Footnote 66 But it is not the ‘bad’ death either, in which the unrepentant sinner died pain-wracked and terror-stricken. Instead, Father Clement wavers: quizzed by Father Warrenne, he variously insists that he holds to the ‘church of Jesus Christ,’ or the ‘church of Christ,’ or, finally, his last words, ‘of the one true Church—saved only by Christ,’ but gives no answer about his Catholicism.Footnote 67 This contrasts starkly with Maria’s assertive Protestant confession, derived from Bible reading instead of controversial debate. Rachel Howard argues that ‘[t]he youths of this text succeed to convert where Clement, an older character who would perhaps be given authority in other novels, as well as society at large, fails.’Footnote 68 However, they succeed only insofar as they grasp the truth of what the novel represents as the truly ancient religion, that of the Bible, not the purported novelty of Catholicism. If Father Clement has been saved, the outcome is oddly muted.
Acuteness of statement, abominable lies: appropriating Father Clement
Within roughly a decade of Father Clement’s initial publication, both Protestant and Catholic readers were unwittingly collaborating in representing Father Clement as a quintessentially Protestant text, distinguished by its unique popularity and its status as progenitor of a new genre.Footnote 69 Father Clement’s widespread recognition by the 1840s as not just any didactic text, but as what could be called a ‘near-Bible,’ was further consolidated by other controversial novelists.Footnote 70 James Godkin, Rachel McCrindell, and M. Chippendale praised the novel as ideal for religious seekers while also providing in-house advertising for their own publishers.Footnote 71 Similarly, The Cottage Register, a monthly series of abridgments, devoted a number to the novel, with a positive reading of Father Clement’s death and a warning that while people in ‘Catholic countries’ were forbidden from having a Bible, British Protestants had no excuse.Footnote 72 More sardonically, Jemima Luke Thompson’s female con-artist in The Female Jesuit (1851) - ‘a narrative as ambiguous and opaque as any that one might encounter in the period’, yet told according to ‘conventional Evangelical sentiment’- reads Father Clement in order to trick her evangelical mark into believing that her Catholic faith is wavering.Footnote 73 Such persistent references suggest how quickly reading Father Clement had become part of the expected cultural repertoire for Protestant readers, and the extent to which it could be marketed as an introduction to Protestant faith. Yet Thompson’s wryly loaded invocation of the novel’s role in conversion narratives also suggests a potential Protestant unease about its actual effects.
On the one hand, Father Clement’s physical portability, cheapness, and accessibility made it attractive to proselytizers and educators; on the other hand, its obvious Presbyterian and Calvinist affiliations highlighted potential denominational tensions. For one early imitator, the anonymous author of Ellmer Castle: A Roman Catholic Story of the Nineteenth Century (1827), the solution was obvious: they duplicated the subtitle and much of the plot and argumentative structure while turning the Protestants into members of the Established Church and making the priests noxious. Significantly, Ellmer Castle jettisoned Father Clement’s vision of conversion; here, conversion requires ‘hearing portions of Scripture read and commented on’ (author’s emphasis).Footnote 74 The novelist’s attempt to borrow Father Clement’s project while stripping it of Presbyterian associations suggests some of the lurking tensions involved in mobilizing the book for evangelical purposes. Such tensions cropped up in the English and Scottish reviews: while the Presbyterian Edinburgh Christian Instructor praised the novel enthusiastically, the evangelical Christian Observer approved of the debate but disliked the Calvinism.Footnote 75 For High Churchmen, meanwhile, Father Clement betrayed a fatally poor grasp of history, theology, and liturgy. One complained of the ‘disgusting levity of manner in speaking sarcastically of the high festival of Easter-Day,’ and another later commented that Kennedy’s ‘blissful ignorance’ no doubt provided ‘high entertainment to Dr. Wiseman and his coadjutors.’Footnote 76 The divide between Presbyterian, evangelical, and High Church perspectives is predictable enough, but that last complaint also suggests an awareness that the popularity of a novel like Father Clement might backfire on its Protestant proponents.
Yet Father Clement posed another problem for both Protestant and Catholic interpretation, because he was possibly too sympathetic. One Protestant reviewer noted, ‘the Protestants of the book are Presbyterians, and Father Clement is by far the most beautiful character in it and has the best of the argument’, a judgment echoed by the Catholic Dublin Review over twenty years later.Footnote 77 The difficulty was twofold: first, Father Clement was surprisingly charismatic; second, his undecided deathbed scene was difficult to translate into the terms of evangelical practice. Ellmer Castle solved both problems by making the Catholic priests unattractive and handing another convert to Protestantism a conventional ‘good’ deathbed scene. Others guided readers to a clearer moral. While the Cottage Register cast Father Clement’s death as an evangelical good death to be emulated, Rachel McCrindell’s The English Governess (1844) associated a priest who ‘departed with all the horrors of purgatory before his eyes’ with Father Clement - a bad death warning against the horrors of Catholicism.Footnote 78 By contrast, the evangelical poet and conduct-book author M. A. Stodart was unable to resolve the scene at all, and argued that it exemplified an improper handling of ‘religious truth’ that was ‘painful to a reflecting mind.’Footnote 79 The ambiguity of Father Clement’s deathbed testimony starkly contrasted with the novel’s celebration elsewhere of the Bible’s accessibility and near-transparency.
Yet despite this potential flaw, Protestants reinvented the novel as such a powerful text that it exerted nearly the same cultural and theological pull they ascribed to the Bible. In 1838, the anti-Catholic campaigner Hugh M’Neile claimed that a woman was assaulted by her Catholic neighbours because Father Clement was in the house. The story was quickly exposed as a fake, but M’Neile’s fabrication suggests how Protestants were developing a narrative about Catholics superstitiously equating the novel with the Bible in its ability to produce heretics.Footnote 80 Just a year later, a correspondent from France claimed that a man suspected of converting to Protestantism had found his home rifled and ‘two Bibles and a Testament, a copy of Father Clement, a tract on the influence of the Holy Spirit, and other tracts all carried off by the police.’Footnote 81 Here figuratively arrested, Father Clement is again imbued with subversive power, now by the forces of the French state itself. The message was that the novel must be contained to prevent spreading its contagion throughout the Catholic countryside.
Such narratives of the novel instilling fear into Catholics extended to tales of its miraculous power to inoculate against Catholicism, or to convert Catholics entirely. It certainly worked on the evangelical scientist Philip Gosse, according to his son Edmund, who claimed that his father’s childhood reading of the novel generated his lifelong ‘violent prejudice’ against Catholics.Footnote 82 For some Catholic converts to Protestantism, though, the novel provided an actual script that guided the reader from ignorance to full-blown enlightenment. Thus, in a popular conversion narrative first published in Baltimore, Luigi Giustiniani, an Italian former priest, singled out Father Clement as the inspiration for his conversion.Footnote 83 Giustiniani represents his encounter with Father Clement in providential terms. He picks up a French translation thinking that it is hagiography, only to realize that it is a Protestant controversial work. Immediately, he homes in on the prooftexts, yet unhappily notes that ‘I had no Bible to confront the truth and correctness of the passages.’Footnote 84 In effect, he finds himself living in the novel: his request for a Bible is met with a demand for the proper permissions, and when he finally acquires one, he excitedly discovers that the passages have been ‘faithfully translated.’Footnote 85 Despite his own vocation, Giustiniani stages himself as Bible-hungry Maria, rather than the resistant Father Clement. His obsessive reading of Father Clement suggests that the novel offers not only convincing prooftexts, but also a useful script for Protestant conversion in the absence of actual Protestants; indeed, he eventually uses the novel as a proselytizing tool.Footnote 86 Finding himself living out the novel’s own plot of Catholic persecutions against would-be converts, Giustiniani witnesses not just to Protestantism, but to the novel’s verisimilitude.Footnote 87
Yet Protestants and Catholics alike also suggested that the novel threatened to produce its own dangerous, or paradoxically beneficial, counter-readings. Patrick C. Fleming reminds us that didactic novelists often anticipated that readers were perfectly capable of repurposing moralizing texts for very different ends.Footnote 88 Some responded to claims for Father Clement’s near-Biblical status by underlining its unattractiveness. The teenage hero of ‘La Belle Cannadienne’ (1838) receives a copy of Father Clement and a Bible to protect his Protestantism while studying in Canada, but soon succumbs to Catholicism and the beautiful Pauline, thanks to both her attractions and a charming priest, in other words, a real-life Father Clement, with a library of pious books.Footnote 89 Much later, in the fictionalized autobiography Not Many Years Ago: Memories of My Life (1881), the narrator recalled how his and his siblings’ annoyance with an anti-Catholic governess climaxed with a deliberate pro-Catholic misreading of the novel, which she had foisted on them.Footnote 90 Children and adolescents, such texts reminded readers, might happily ignore a novel’s message for their own purposes, even when the novel’s message was as purportedly clear as Father Clement’s. Nor did Father Clement necessarily help conduct controversy in real life, as the Catholic convert Fanny-Maria Pittar discovered when she insisted on Father Clement’s authority that ‘the Church forbids the use of Scripture to the laity.’Footnote 91 As one Catholic reviewer of Blanche Neville summed it up, ‘[w]e would as soon believe that the perusal of ‘Harriet Wilson’s Memoirs’ could bring back to virtue the abandoned female, as that the abominable book of lies above mentioned [Father Clement] could turn to Anglicanism an honest and educated Catholic.’Footnote 92
Even more strongly, Catholic converts mischievously appropriated Protestant claims for Father Clement’s evangelical power by retrospectively casting the novel in a starring role in their conversions. The publisher Charles Kegan Paul identified Father Clement, along with Mrs. Sherwood’s The Nun, as an early source of his positive disposition towards Catholicism because the Protestant claims were ‘so evasive and so fatuous,’ whereas Catholic rituals seemed ‘meritorious, or at least perfectly innocent.’Footnote 93 Similarly, the priest O. R. Vassall singled out Father Clement and Scott’s novels, ‘together with the history of England and of the Crusades, [which] gave me, when very young, an interest in Catholicism which I never lost.’Footnote 94 Like Kegan Paul, Vassall ironically rooted his conversion in Protestant works that testified, against their will, to a different truth. Along those lines, the character of Father Clement himself proved especially interesting. The nun and novelist Augusta Theodosia Drane, later Mother Francis Raphael of the Order of St. Dominic, recalled that as a child, she identified with the ‘attractive’ Father Clement, and was delighted that ‘Clement had not got so far as ‘to declare himself a Calvinist’ when he died.’Footnote 95 As a child reader, Drane’s emotional response to the narrative’s sentimental underpinnings reworks the uncertain deathbed scene as a Catholic triumph, and turns the novel itself into an unwitting celebration of Catholic spirituality.
By crafting a character who rejected controversy as far as possible, Kennedy opened up her novel to be read as a celebration of obedience to Catholic authority. This was how the novelist Lady Georgiana Fullerton remembered interpreting the narrative. As a fourteen-year-old, she read Father Clement for the first time and, as Drane did, identified with the ‘wrong’ character. Father Clement
excited all my admiration and sympathy…and I sided entirely with the girl in the family, who was a devout Catholic, and wished I could, like her, have gone to confession to Father Dormer, and thought how exactly I would have obeyed him. On the other hand, I took the greatest dislike to the other sister, who was being drawn away from the Church by her Protestant cousins, and I thought it very wrong of her not to submit to Father Dormer. So strong a feeling had I about this imaginary Catholic priest, that being one day very angry with my governess who, as a punishment, had taken away from me for a fortnight a Bible which had been given me a few days before, I said to myself, ‘A strange way indeed of making one good!’ But I suddenly remembered that Father Dormer had made Maria give up the Protestant Bible she had got hold of, and the beautiful things he had said to her about obedience, and I became quite humble and obedient for once.Footnote 96
In this creative misreading, Lady Georgiana models her spiritual life on the characters who obey clerical authority, not the Protestant rebels whom the novel associates with Christian truth and liberty. Like Giustiniani, Lady Georgiana repeats the novel’s plot—this time, the Bible renunciation motif—but she turns Bible renunciation into a pattern of positive proto-Catholic ‘obedience.’ Significantly, it is the quality of Father Clement’s sympathetic speech which awaken Lady Georgiana’s Catholic sentiments; his evasions of controversy, to which the reader is supposed to respond sceptically, here elicit her wholesale approval. Maria, whose newfound Protestantism she is supposed to admire, becomes admirable only insofar as she abandons what Lady Georgiana figures as wilfulness.
Recalling the ancient faith: Catholic novelists rework Father Clement
Initial attempts at the Catholic controversial novel, such as John Hughes’ The Conversion and Edifying Death of Andrew Dunn; Or, a Guide to Truth and Peace (1828), a response to the early Religious Tract Society narrative The History of Andrew Dunn (c. 1803), failed to attract an audience. The transatlantic popularity of Father Clement, however, mandated a more concerted set of rebuttals: in the roughly two decades following Father Clement’s initial publication, there were six fictional ripostes. Of this group, the least successful were the otherwise unknown Mrs. Robinson’s Florence, or the Aspirant (1829), the anonymous The Biblicals, or Glenmoyle Castle. A Tale of Modern Times (1831), and The Converts, A Tale of the Nineteenth Century: Or, Romanism and Protestantism Brought to Bear in Their True Light against One Another (1837). Florence was by far the most expensive book, at 24s. for three volumes, a marketing decision that identified it with the pricier and increasingly unfashionable ‘polite’ religious novel. By contrast, Catherine Englefield’s Father Oswald: A Genuine Catholic Story (1842) sold at 6s. and managed a second edition before being pirated in the United States.Footnote 97 The novel that truly duplicated Father Clement’s success was E. C. Agnew’s Geraldine, A Tale of Conscience (1837-39), which stayed in print until 1911; enjoyed multiple translations; had a sequel, Rome and the Abbey (1849); and even sparked its own Protestant riposte, Gorges Lowther’s Gerald: A Tale of Conscience (1840). While it, too, was initially more expensive, at 12s. for the first volumes and another 6s. for the third, the Catholic publisher Charles Dolman soon issued a one-volume cheap edition for 5s., suitable for school prize editions.Footnote 98 The Italian-American Catholic priest Charles Constantine Pise’s Father Rowland: A North American Tale (1829) came second, with a slightly edited version appearing in Dublin in 1839 and then reprints in Ireland and/or England in 1849, c. 1850, 1852, and c. 1890; an obituary described the novel as ‘still in print’ in the USA as of 1884.Footnote 99
Unlike Ellmer Castle, these novels were not concerned with rehashing Father Clement’s plot. Only Father Oswald parallels Father Clement by resetting the action in the French Revolution of 1830 and inverting its plot elements. Edward, the equivalent to Ernest, discovers that sola scriptura destroys rather than confirms faith; the political subversives are Protestants; Father Oswald happily quotes chapter and verse; and the marriage plot issues in a marriage between a converted Catholic (Edward) and his staunchly Catholic beloved, who together spend a lifetime in ‘charity and good works.’Footnote 100 By contrast, the other novels indicate their relationship to Father Clement sidelong, as when The Biblicals refers to ‘that interesting fiction, “Father Clement,”’ or the author of The Converts claims that she was converted to Catholicism by Father Clement, among other Protestant works.Footnote 101 More comically, Florence concludes with its title character standing up to her anti-Catholic uncle and insisting that Father Clement is ‘not worthy’ of being burnt in the fireplace alongside her Catholic books.Footnote 102 In effect, most novelists opted to challenge Father Clement’s project by moving to different narrative territory.
A key part of that move involved subverting Father Clement’s early eighteenth-century historical setting, ‘which reminded readers of past Catholic disloyalty to the House of Hanover’.Footnote 103 All of these novels are set in the present or very immediate past: thus, Geraldine, The Converts, and Florence all feature modern Catholic patriots whose beliefs fully coincide with their nationalist sensibilities. Moreover, Father Clement’s attack on Catholic rebelliousness returns in Catholic complaints about Protestantism’s danger to public order. Father Oswald holds that the French Revolution of 1830 derived from Protestant principles, and celebrates Catholic rule instead as a guarantor of national stability. Similarly, The Biblicals satirizes the so-called Second Reformation in Ireland, a Protestant evangelizing effort of the 1820s intended to convert the Irish peasantry; its spread sparked controversy over the civic dangers posed by Bible societies.Footnote 104 Father Rowland features a Catholic who fought with George Washington and argues that ‘Catholicism is perfectly compatible with Republicanism, that holiness and good breeding are of a piece, that the social order is but reinforced by the presence of Catholics.’Footnote 105 All of these authors map a continuous Catholic tradition within the UK and Ireland, Europe, and the newly-formed United States. They deny that the Reformation was anything more than a superficial historical disruption, and associate Protestantism with religio-political chaos. Unlike the ever-fragmenting Protestant churches, Roman Catholicism maintains but subordinates national sovereignty under the umbrella of a unified global Church.
If most novelists opted to avoid ‘revers[ing] the signifiers’ of Father Clement, they nevertheless singled out the theological and formal implications of two of its key positions: the turn to prooftexting and the role of lay evangelism, especially female lay evangelism.Footnote 106 In both cases, the problem was how to construct a hard line in fictional narrative to separate traditions that considerably overlapped in nonfiction apologetics.Footnote 107 As novelists discovered, addressing lay roles in the Church was inseparable from addressing prooftexting. For example, the Catholic novelist E. M. de Bodenham, a contemporary of Grace Kennedy, relied heavily on prooftexting. But de Bodenham’s conversational exposition of Catholic doctrine, Mrs. Herbert and the Villagers (1823-24), reminds readers of the ‘folly and danger’ involved in believing that private judgment can trump ‘the interpretation of those whom God has deputed to explain its meaning.’Footnote 108 Mrs. Herbert’s modesty in interpreting Biblical texts evoked contemporary debates about what roles laywomen should have in maintaining and expanding the Catholic community. During the harshest persecutions of the post-Reformation period, English Catholic laywomen were central to transmitting the faith: they would remain Catholic while their husbands officially conformed to the Church of England, instruct the children, proselytize, conceal priests, assist other recusants, and so on.Footnote 109 In the absence of a stable hierarchy or regular access to priests, ‘[w]omen accepted their role as women to submit, but they increasingly chose or re-prioritised which authorities they would submit to and in what ways.’Footnote 110 As the responses to Father Clement suggest, however, anything that seemed reminiscent of such religious labour intersected dangerously with Evangelical fictions representing Protestant women disputing theology with clergymen on equal terms. Nineteenth-century Catholic women were usually enjoined to ‘self-sacrificing domestic labour’ in the service of faith; Georgiana Fullerton was not alone in disliking Maria’s refusal to ‘submit.’Footnote 111 Yet such attempts to restrict women’s roles in proselytization were not without their dissenters. In the United States, ‘Catholic women [were] active agents in the creation of Catholic identity for themselves and in the spreading of Catholicism among Protestants.’Footnote 112
As a result, in their desire to dispatch Father Clement and its praise for both prooftexting and lay evangelical activity, Catholic controversialists often did their best to downplay prooftexting’s role in the Catholic apologetic tradition in favour of more programmatic courses of study. Protestant prooftexting, with its claims to derive all necessary truth from an accessible text, was figured as a hyper-individualist reading strategy that detached the would-be exegete from a larger community of believers, much as it detached verses from each other. By contrast, Catholic Bible reading, especially lay reading, was represented as a necessarily incomplete route to conversion, and one that required considerable assistance from authorized interpreters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Charles Constantine Pise’s (1801-66) attempt to duplicate not Father Clement’s narrative, but instead its prooftexting, found few imitators. The title character of Father Rowland proves Catholicism true through prooftexts appealing to the Bible alone (Marian doctrines excepted), and thus reminds Protestant readers that, contrary to Protestant belief, Catholic readers engaged in ‘private Bible study’ with some frequency.Footnote 113 But Father Rowland insists that Roman Catholics proceed as Protestants do themselves when seeking ‘true religion’: ‘Well we do read the Bible; and according to the privilege given by the Protestant to interpret as we please, we do so; and, therefore, no one has any right to blame us; no one has any right to say we are in error.’Footnote 114 Having undermined Protestant rhetorical strategies, Father Rowland undermines Protestant Biblicism altogether by reminding his Protestant auditors that the Bible could hardly be ‘the sole rule of faith’ when Christianity existed without it for several decades.Footnote 115
Instead, most authors undermined sola scriptura prooftexting altogether by pointing out its logical inconsistences. Thus, The Biblicals begins with prooftexting only to undermine it. After a Catholic, O’Bryan, points out that anyone can read the Bible ‘provided that they do not affix to it any other meaning than that which the church sanctions,’ his Protestant interlocutor objects that the Scriptures are ‘perfectly easy and intelligible.’ At which point, O’Bryan offers the most common objection in Catholic fiction to prooftexting in general and sola scriptura in particular: ‘But why, in the name of common sense, if the book be so easy, are your numberless sects always quarrelling about it? If the bible be so plain and intelligible, why do they not all agree about this one plain easy meaning? Their dissensions are practically proofs of its difficulty.’Footnote 116 Although Biblical quotations fly at the novel’s opening, The Biblicals follows Father Rowland in arguing that the Bible subverts rather than supports ‘easy’ readings. Moreover, in criticizing Protestant dissent, O’Bryan also critiques the chaotic political implications of Protestant disunion. Such chaos emerges in the novel’s parody of evangelical missionary fundraising, in which the missionaries admit to engaging in interracial marriages but seek Anglo-Irish Protestant women instead; a young woman listening to the graphic speeches pointedly ‘faint[s] upon’ the eligible lord standing next to her.Footnote 117 The eroticized atmosphere of Protestant missionary meetings results from the same kind of license the novel associates with private judgment. In contrast, The Biblicals charts the conversion of its protagonist through a series of conversations, beginning with his beloved, moving through encounters with Catholic laymen and a very High Church Anglican priest, and concluding with a Catholic priest. Here, conversion emerges via dialogue with increasingly authoritative voices associated with the Catholic Church, not through close readings of the Bible.
Such a progression, though, relied both implicitly and explicitly on masculine authority, in sharp contradistinction to Father Clement’s celebration of women’s controversial skills. In fact, the Dublin reprinting of Father Rowland sharply toned down how Louisa, intrigued by Catholicism, argues against her family’s more fixed Protestantism, as if even self-defence in the ‘right’ cause exceeded the bounds of a young woman’s domestic place. Similarly, the title character of Florence distinguishes herself by passive resistance to her anti-Catholic uncle. Her reading is guided by the local Catholic priest, Mr. Ashburn, who exemplifies the ‘learned authority, a priest or an educated lay person, who can explain the precepts and history of Catholicism to the searching Protestant.’Footnote 118 The novel warns against exactly the kind of unsupervised women’s Bible reading that Maria practices in Father Clement—in fact, Florence’s Protestant mother confesses that ‘there were many parts which she had never allowed Florence to read.’Footnote 119 At the same time, the novel’s rejection of sola scriptura coincides with its abandonment of controversial dialogue amongst its characters: the third volume reprints wholesale multiple chapters of H. Howard’s Remarks on the Erroneous Opinions Concerning the Catholic Religion (1824-25), so that Robertson silences herself almost entirely on doctrine. Instead of dramatizing religious controversy, Robertson ultimately disclaims any pretence of reworking authoritative ideas in her own language. The novel thus models deference to male and clerical authority, not the act of religious disputation or even polite conversation.
Yet not all novelists understood women’s obedience to the Catholic Church to mean silence, even if they rejected women sparring with priests à la Father Clement. As Rachel Howard correctly points out, in Evangelical novels, a woman’s ‘religious zealousness’ meant that ‘the morally superior heroine could reject the advice and demands of a father or husband, and even live happily as an old maid in an exclusively female sphere’. Catholics developed their own variants of this plot, with or without convents.Footnote 120 A case in point is The Converts, which tracks the conversions of multiple young women, rewarding them variously with a holy death, holy marriage, or a holy life in an Irish convent. The novel finesses the question of female evangelism by proposing instead that women acknowledging Church authority may through mutual example lead others to conversion. Thus, Eleanor Vivian, who converts only after ‘a calm and keen investigation, an earnest and diligent search after moral and religious truth,’ also expounds Catholic doctrine for future convert Adel, substantiating her arguments with both Biblical narrative and Church councils.Footnote 121 Unlike Maria Clarenham, a naïve reader, Eleanor includes tags such as ‘the Catholic Church teaches’ when instructing Adel, so that both Adel and the reader remember that the authority of her teachings does not belong to her.Footnote 122 Nor does her conversion emerge via intensive reading of a single text, but through multiple and collaborative readings. And these women convert as part of a community, affirmed by the powerful effects of Eleanor’s deathbed witnessing, ‘unaccompanied by a single terror,’ that consolidates the faith of the friends and family clustered around her—a stark contrast to Father Clement’s problematic end.Footnote 123
E. C. Agnew, however, chose in Geraldine to explore what she saw as the paradoxically radical possibilities of women’s extreme obedience.Footnote 124 The first two volumes trace Geraldine’s conversion to Catholicism through extended study, a process helped by a local Catholic family and her unpleasant encounters with anti-Romanist crusaders, including her original intended husband. The third volume follows her marriage to a wealthy Catholic landowner, Eustace de Grey, and her ultimate decision to take vows. As the American Catholic convert Orestes Brownson pointed out, most of Geraldine’s narrative is a march through texts, a ‘weary search for truth,’ which Brownson found counter-productive; Agnew, however, much like Mrs. Robertson, strategically contrasts Geraldine’s deep reading in history and theology to Maria’s intensive, transformative encounter with the Bible alone.Footnote 125 Radical obedience begins, in fact, by disavowing prooftexting and sola scriptura. Geraldine denounces ‘the system of private interpretation of Scripture’ as the cause of Protestantism’s many ills. Her Presbyterian friend Katherine has to agree, and both characters sidestep prooftexting disputation whenever possible.Footnote 126
Instead, Geraldine dramatizes conversion in terms of gendered rebellion and obligation, as Geraldine constantly negotiates between her desire to devote herself entirely to God and her father’s and husband’s insistence that she cater to their interests. Geraldine initially represents Geraldine’s conversion as rejection of her father’s wishes, but the end of the second volume reveals that her father is actually Catholic. This revelation transforms rebellion into filial duty. But the belated third volume finds Geraldine critiquing her father, who rejects the theatricality of her ‘pious enthusiasm’ and demands she engage in only private devotions.Footnote 127 This struggle takes place during a visit to Rome, dramatizing how the post-Emancipation English recusant community engaged with converts’ interest in Continental devotional practices, promoted in part by touring Catholic missionaries like Luigi Gentili.Footnote 128 More ominously, Geraldine discovers that her religious vocation has ‘vanished at the sight of her father,’ implying that domestic bonds constrain female spirituality.Footnote 129 This situation only worsens once Geraldine marries Eustace. Geraldine eventually begs him for a celibate marriage that will not trammel her by ‘earthly love,’ but Eustace, exasperated, orders that she will ‘for once, yield your judgment to mine’ so that she can be ‘happy.’Footnote 130 Like Geraldine’s father, Eustace demands that Geraldine abandon her religious quest for worldly reasons; in both cases, Geraldine’s obedience is a divine test set to purify her spirit. Geraldine is rewarded: her husband agrees to celibacy, only to immediately drown. God removes all the obstructive patriarchal figures for Himself in order that Geraldine may unite with Him by taking vows. The novel thus simultaneously counsels women’s absolute obedience to male authority and rewards them for it with a suspiciously excessive violence.
In all of these novels, no matter what their attitude to gender, the ultimate riposte to Father Clement’s conversion narrative lies in the communal experience of the Mass or other miracles, which replaces private Bible reading as the primary engine of spiritual transformation. Whereas Father Clement represents Catholic worship as purely sentimental, conflating tears with devotion, Catholic conversion fiction instead foregrounds how Catholic liturgy, witnessed and performed in a church service, generates an entirely different form of emotional experience. Thus, Robertson’s Florence experiences her religious awakening not while reading the Bible, but during a Church service:
She speedily ran over all that had passed before her eyes, and began to doubt, whether that which seemed mere unmeaning acting might not have under it some very important sign or symbol, that brought an accession of devout feeling, and kept alive that holy animation which she had now experienced for the first time.Footnote 131
For Robertson, even barely-understood liturgy is sufficient to produce ‘devout feeling’; just the act of witnessing is enough to reorient Florence’s emotions toward God, in a way that Protestant Bible-reading has apparently failed to accomplish. Significantly, unlike the dismissive Ernest in Father Clement, Florence both senses something godly at work in the rituals themselves and is self-consciously incapable of decoding what she has seen. ‘[U]nmeaning acting’ is a Protestant trace, the remnant of Ernest’s point-of-view that Florence renames as anti-Catholic ideology. Where Father Clement celebrates the self-glossing Bible, accessible to the solitary and isolated reader, Florence insists that witnessing the Mass properly brings about a new awareness of mysteries beyond the reach of any single self. Similarly, when the eponymous Geraldine’s convictions ebb, she is confirmed in her newfound faith not by Bible reading, but by observing a chapel service. In this case, her ‘delicious tears’ as she listens to the choir signal not a lack of emotional control, but rather a necessary release after a long period of spiritual dryness; it is this release that enables her to join ‘in Catholic faith and awe, with the rest of the flock.’Footnote 132 And Edward in Father Oswald converts not by reading the Bible, but by observing both the miracle of St. Januarius’ blood and the conversion of a former radical friend, Le Sage, to Catholicism. As Edward explains, while the former ‘is the triumph of Omnipotence over the fixed laws of matter, the other is the triumph of mercy over the free, but perverted will of man: the religion which can produce this effect must be divine.’Footnote 133 Protestants, no believers in modern miracles, interpret God’s actions through the medium of a complex text that sola scriptura obscures rather than clarifies; Catholics directly witness God’s work in the world.
Conclusion
As Father Clement’s Catholic readers immediately discerned, Grace Kennedy had developed a successful formula for the novel of religious controversy that focused, first and foremost, on Bible reading and prooftexting as the key signifier of Protestant identity. Her critique of the polite religious novel, which turned the genteel code of polite conversation into a front for nefarious Jesuit activity, turned out to resonate with anxious Protestant readers in the years leading up to Catholic Emancipation in 1829. What enabled the novel to survive beyond its first popularity and the potential limitations of its Presbyterianism, though, were the wide-ranging, transdenominational attempts to make reading the novel an expected part of any Protestant’s religious education: a ‘near-Bible.’ Yet as much of its Catholic audience demonstrated, Kennedy’s attempt to dispatch polite religious conversation in the form of Father Clement could also backfire spectacularly, as his appeal overwhelmed those of his Protestant opponents. For Catholic novelists in particular, working through Father Clement’s Biblicism opened up possibilities for defining how an explicitly Catholic controversial novel might look. Indeed, by her very success in remaking the Protestant controversial novel, Kennedy inadvertently paved the way for the rise of Victorian Catholic bestsellers like Geraldine and their own literary progeny. Catholic novelists forthrightly insisted on their own ongoing presence in English, Irish, and American national narratives not as anachronistic subversives, but as citizens fully participating in the present and, quite possibly, directing the future.
